From the scholarly Martin Haspelmath on Facebook a few hours ago, a report on a spam conference, the Global Summit on Languages & Linguistics, June 16-17, 2015, in Alicante, Spain, with a glossy website calling for papers. Martin noted that the sponsoring organization, OMICS, “is well-known as a spam publisher, and now seems to be moving into organizing spam conferences”; on OMICS, see this Wikipedia page.
(Spam publishers make money by collecting fees from authors, and spam conferences make money from registration fees.)
As Martin’s posting was arriving on Facebook, not one but two messages in my e-mail solicited submissions to spam journals in linguistics.
Jeffrey Beall on his “Scholarly Open Access: Critical analysis of scholarly open-access publishing” site, maintains a list of “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers” (too many Ps, but let that pass), which has both of the “publishers” in my e-mail:
the American Research Institute for Policy Development (ARIPD), source of the International Journal of Linguistics and Communication (IJLC)
Academicians’ Research Center (ARC), source of the International Journal on English Language and Literature (IJSELL)
Beall’s list has an especially entertaining entry on the first of these, beginning:
Questionable OA Publisher Launches with a Clever Website and 52 New Journals
A recent addition to my list is the American Research Institute for Policy Development (ARIPD), which, unlike most new OA publishers, has a clever and professional-appearing website, until you look a little closer, that is.
It’s a jungle out there.
March 22, 2017 at 11:43 am |
Note that Beall’s site has been taken down, with some moderate (https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/12/16/parting-company-with-jeffrey-beall/) and some strong opponents (http://www.scholarlyoa.net/index.htm) of his site and methods.